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Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers: A Retrospective

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│By Megan Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources│

The COVID-19 pandemic and pivot to remote instruction shed light on a longstanding challenge in the humanities and related disciplines – how can instructors effectively incorporate digital primary sources into their pedagogy?

According to a 2021 study by ITHAKA S&R, two of the key obstacles to teaching with primary sources are: (1) discovery tools are not optimised to help instructors locate resources for classroom use and (2) students do not always have the required skills to find and evaluate relevant primary sources. These two problems were top of mind when designing the Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers which are now approaching the three-year anniversary of their initial release.

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The Second Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Program

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DH User Group - all members

|By Becca Bowden, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager|

Gale is pleased to announce its second ‘Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Program’. Following on from the success of the program in 2022, we are excited to invite eight new Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab users to collaborate closely with the Digital Humanities production team at Gale. The members of the Digital Humanities User Engagement Program will provide feedback throughout the product development process, keeping the voice of the researcher at the center of the product experience.

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Birds of a Feather, Work Together – Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups

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Notes from our DH correspondent

│By Dr Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

December 2022 saw the release of the new ‘Groups’ feature in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This blog post will consider the nature and benefits of teamwork in Digital Humanities (DH) and highlight Group workflows in the Lab that support effective collaborative practices.

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Refugee Nurses and the Second World War

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Nursing Times cover images
In this blog post, Dr Jane Brooks discusses the value of the Historic Nursing Journals – one of the collections included in Women’s Studies Archive: Female Forerunners Worldwide. The Historic Nursing Journals collection was sourced from the Royal College of Nursing (UK). Dr Brooks also explains how she is using the fascinating primary sources in this archive in her own research.

|Dr Jane Brooks, Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester (UK)|

The digitisation of Historic Nursing Journals by Gale has created a dynamic and valuable resource for historians of nursing in the UK and beyond. I have been working in the field of nursing history for over twenty years. In 2010, I began researching nursing in the Second World War. I predominantly work with personal testimony such as oral history, letters and diaries. However, as well as these source materials usually located in public archives, I have used multiple types of entries in nursing journals, most frequently Nursing Times. I live in Yorkshire, the Royal College of Nursing headquarters library is in London and the archives are in Edinburgh, so every time I wanted to conduct any research using Nursing Times I had to travel to review the hard copies. If I needed to check a reference, I again had to make a journey or request one of the very busy archive staff check for me.

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More Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers Added

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Learning Center visible on screen of student user

│By Emma Harris and Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editors, Gale Primary Sources│

After the successful launch of the first Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers in Autumn 2021, Gale has released Learning Centers into a larger selection of our archives in August, with more to come in November 2022. The Learning Centers are comprehensive guides for both students and instructors to enhance their approach to researching primary sources and for developing the critical thinking skills needed for their analysis. The Learning Centers are also particularly helpful for those using primary source archives independently for the first time.

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Introducing the Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Program

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|By Rebecca Bowden, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager|

On June 27, 2022, Gale launched its first Digital Humanities User Engagement Program, inviting eight Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab users to collaborate closely with the Digital Humanities Production team at Gale. The members of the User Engagement Program will provide feedback throughout the product development process, keeping the voice of the researcher at the center of the product experience.

Below, the Digital Humanities Product Managers who developed the program – Rebecca Bowden and Megan Sullivan – explain more!

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New State Papers Online Experience Available to Preview

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State Papers Online search bar and source design

|By Megan Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources|

I am delighted to share that after several years of research and technical preparation, an updated experience for State Papers Online (SPO) will be ready to preview on Monday, August 1, 2022. This will be a “soft launch”, meaning that on this date, users can access the beta version of the new State Papers Online from a link that will be available from the current SPO homepage. We encourage users to try the new experience and send us their feedback. We are also recruiting for paid user interviews and usability testing. We plan to retire the current version of State Papers Online in December 2022 and from that date forward, SPO will be exclusively available in the updated experience.

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